Medicine: Perambulator to Grave

Everybody loves a chubby babybut is a chubby baby necessarily the
healthiest and destined to live longest? Probably not, and especially
if the chubbiness persists through adolescence, suggests Antioch
College's Anthropologist Stanley M.
Garn in a study for the 1960 White House Conference on Children and
Youth. In fact, the increase of overeating and obesity in childhood
leads Garn to ask: "Are we eating our way to the cemetery
beginning in the perambulator?"

Highly fattening food is now
generally and easily available to the vast majority of U.S. youngsters,
Garn notes. As...